Shortly before his death, the aging poet wrote to a woman with whom he had exchanged dramatic letters forty years earlier – about what it’s like to survive yourself.
There are dramas between people that were only possible in the age of the letter, without the later media of communication. In October 1822, Goethe received a letter from a lady whom he had never seen but whose handwriting was familiar to him. Augusta Countess Stolberg was the sister of two of his closest Sturm und Drang friends, the brothers Friedrich Leopold and Christian Stolberg, enthusiastic young poets with whom Goethe undertook a trip to Switzerland in 1775. She caused a stir because the three young men were cooling off naked in mountain waterfalls. Nature! Incidentally, the Stolberg family was pietistic and pious, their poetic household god and family friend was the “Messiah” poet Klopstock.